I understand the fundamental functioning of a wormhole, just take a sheet of paper representing space time, and then fold it to make a hole with a pencil, so there you go, you have a faster passage to the other side of the sheet. However, what I don’t understand is how exactly space-time folds to allow for this passage. I always thought that space was something flat that has leveling according to the mass of stars and planets, so how exactly is it folded up allowing it to pass through a wormhole?
In: Physics
Current experiments indicate space is “flat”, but none of these experiments are precise enough yet to truly rule that it is. They just indicate a high likelihood it is. Even an extremely slight curve to spacetime would change the nature of our universe drastically from flat, to positive curve or negative curve.
Wormholes are still purely theoretically to our knowledge. As in we haven’t actually found any yet. Or at least any that we are aware are wormholes (lookin’ at you black holes!).
The theory behind them is that they provide a shorter path between two points. Similar to drilling a tunnel through a hill instead of walking around it. Except you aren’t really drilling through anything, you are just decreasing the distance between two points compared to the distance involved using a different path. The paper-pencile metaphor is one of the best ways to visualize it.
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